Sunday, August 17, 2008

Pocket Freemind, Continuing After 0.5 Release

Below are my updates on Pocket Freemind project, after the last 0.5 release. I just code away for a while, seeking to see how some ideas will be in concrete form. Now it seems apropriate to take a break and write some notes and update about it.

  • The extraction of libPocketFreemind and new-more-modularized GUI. I've extraced the object model and start a new GUI on top of it to allow more flexibility to enhance more the user interface. The original GUI is still intact sharing the same libPocketFreemind (which extracted from it relatively painless) .
  • Soft-key menu is back, complemented with custom toolbar. Standard .NET CF toolbar makes the standard soft-key unusable so I make the custom toolbar that does not interfere with it. I use picture box, panel, imagelist and a little hack. Hopefully user would still feel it as a toolbar :).
  • Individual color picking instead of predefines set of style. There is now color picker for node's font and background color. Thanks to TamPPC for the code. Node style would be revisit later with editable style list.
  • Dialogless note window. It use splitter to share screen with the map's View. It is now looks more like Freemind on the desktop. I think this way the note can be more useful and more comfortbable to enter
  • Icon dialog updated. It now has (emulated) upper right close window button
  • More align with the desktop version. The menu, term, bahavior use the desktop version for reference as long as it still makes sense. The special case of pocketpc should be considered too of course.
I guess that's it for now. Now, to close, it's time for some mandatory screenshot. Here we go :



The new note view with resizable splitter. It synched as the node is navigated. There is the node with individual color and background too.


The above is the new look of icon dialog.


And here is the new color picker. The base code is in vb. I wrapped the code relatively as it is in user control (adding an event handler), put it in a dialog, add a preview, and use it in c# project (the benefit of multilanguageness of .net :) ).

Thankfully, it came at the right time, there used to be only commercial color picker component around.